What can cause hiccups | what answered

What can cause hiccups

What can cause hiccups, Have you ever been in an embarrassing situation where you had a hiccup and everyone looked at you? Well don't you want to know what might have caused it and what are hiccups? Hiccups occur when your diaphragm (the muscle that separates your chest cavity from your abdomen) suddenly and involuntarily contracts and recurs several times per minute. One of the strange facts about hiccups is that males are more likely to develop hiccups that last for more than 48 hours than women.

What happens when your diaphragm contracts is that it makes you breathe in air very quickly. That sudden rush of air into the lungs causes the epiglottis to close, creating that hic sound. A hiccup is an involuntary action; we have no control over it. There are 2 types of hiccups; Short-term ones and Persistent & intractable hiccups.

There is no need to worry about those short term hiccups as they are perfectly normal and happen to everyone and usually go away eventually on its own with no need to any medication however medication is inevitable in some cases. These short-term hiccups might happen as a result to drinking a large amount of alcohol, excessive smoking, when you eat or drink too quickly or when a sudden change in the room temperature happen. However what you may not know is that some hiccups are caused by psychological cases like shock, being under pressure or stress and excitement.

As for persistent hiccups, they last over 48 hours and not more than 1 month whole intractable hiccups persist for longer than a month. This rare type of hiccups can be caused by a more serious underlying condition, such as gastro-oesophageal reflux disease (GORD). Persistent hiccups can sometimes be caused by a reaction to certain types of medication; however, in other cases the cause of hiccups remains unknown even with testing and investigation an underlying cause can sometimes not be identified.

Just like the short-term hiccups, persistent hiccups might also be caused by psychological factors like those strong feelings of shock, Fear, grief, excitement, anxiety, stress and hysterical behavior.

In most of hiccup cases you would not need any medical treatment and they usually stop on its own after a short while. However, there are few things that you could try to stop your hiccups; slowly sipping ice-cold water, you could hold your stomach for a while, you could bite on a lemon, breathing into a paper bag and you can try leaning forward to compress your chest. Some of these things are already very well-known but they are all for the short-term hiccups while the persistent hiccups might require a real treatment with medicine or even surgery.

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